


Tron 2.1 Chapter 1.

by David1



Series: Tron 2.1 [1]
Category: Tron (1982), Tron (Movies), Tron 2.0
Genre: Full Story, Other, Tron - Freeform, Tron 2.0 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-22
Updated: 2011-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-14 23:05:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/David1/pseuds/David1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tron 2.1 is a follow-on from the game Tron 2.0 which continued the events of Tron.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tron 2.1 Chapter 1.

**Author's Note:**

> Although Tron 2.0 is considered the spiritual successor to Tron, with the release of Tron Legacy, it was determined to be non-cannon and the continuation of the story was ceased. This fanfic is a novel-length continuation that concludes the tale of Jet, Mercury, Alan and Flynn and brings the story to a close. Although the story has been completed ( over 300,000 words ) and is available in “rough” format, this is the edited version. I will clean up and repost the entire story here for fans. In Tron 2.0, the story ends with Jet in denial about Mercury after she is lost when the Data Carrier crashes. In Tron 2.1, Jet is determined to return to the digital world and return to her. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's written in the style of the original movie. The original "goodbye" scene can be viewed on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnN3UOHxnFo

Tron 2.1  
Prologue.  
Timeframe - As the FCon carrier breaks apart, the last time Jet saw Mercury.

“I guess this is end-of-line”

Mercury stepped back, swallowing deeply as she closed her eyes. It wasn't supposed to end this way. The hero gets the girl. He doesn't leave her behind.

Around him, the server was already breaking apart. Jet had never considered what would become of her after it derezzed. It had been his doing that led to these circumstances. Why didn't he just wait until they docked. Until she was safe. Why had his father reloaded her onto the server grid?

Jet lifted his hand to her face, brushing the line of her cheek with a fingertip.

At his touch, she stepped forward and threw her arms around him, burying her face in his shoulder. Jet let his own arms fall around her lithe shoulders as he embraced her tightly back. His own user energy flowed into her now through their closeness but even that wouldn't be enough to save them.

Then she looked up into his eyes, a single drop of liquid energy forming in the corner of her eye.

She was more than just a program to him now. She had sacrificed herself for him once before but now she was as real to him as the user world that he came from.

A firm hand pushed Jet back even as Mercury shook her head in denial of what was happening.

“Jet, you need to leave. You can restore me from a backup, but if you derez then even the users can’t bring you back.”

Her voice was breaking, her self-assuredness fading. The warrior was replaced by the woman, frightened, soon to be alone.

“Mercury...” Jet began, but the words he tried to find were lost in his throat. He stepped forward to take her again but she held him back, shaking her head.

Summoning the last of his will, he found the strength to say what he needed to.

“I don’t want to leave. I need to know you’re safe. I need to know you can get off this carrier before I go.”

Her smile faded as the tears of energy pooling in her eyes run.

“Jet, I need to believe in your power as a user,” she began. “I need to put my faith in you."

"Then trust me now."

Mercury shook her head and the tears cascaded around her.

"No. I know too much now. I know you can’t save this carrier and you need to be gone when it crashes. I can't face my own deresolution unless I know you're safe.”

Jet looked into her eyes. The facade she presented him with was failing and she knew it. This wasn’t the same Mercury he had crossed systems with – it was something deeper. Something he had only now come to realized existed as something more than in his own mind. This was the real Mercury. She turned from his face and he knew he couldn't leave her.

The data carrier shuddered and several panels deresolved into primatives around him. There wasn't much time left now. The crash had begun its final phase.

Then she was facing him again, back close to him once more. She looked up into his eyes with a final pleading glance.

“Find me, bring me back, then return to me,” she begged him, “Find me and if you can’t find me, find an earlier version and restore my memories of you."

Pulling her in tightly again, Jet lowered his mouth to hers for the last time and the kissed. Her face glowed as his user powers flowed into her.

“You have my promise,” said Jet slowly as they came apart, "That nothing will keep me from returning to you”.

Tears of light flowed freely down Mercury’s face as she smiled. She broke their embrace and stepped back even as Jet grasped her hand.

“What is it that users say when they disconnect from someone unwillingly?”

“I love you,” said Jet, feeling her slip away.

“I love you,” responded Mercury, then in a single fluid move before Jet could stop her, twisted herself out of Jet’s grip and returned deep into the data carrier.

Jet stood for a moment, not understanding then before he could run after her, the F-CON merge hit him hard, knocking him into the reintegration stream transfer port.

A final reverberating shock made it's way through the server and it broke apart before Jet was reintegrated.

"Mercury," he screamed.

He was no longer there for her to hear him.

Tron 2.1  
Chapter 1. Synchronisation.  
Timeframe - Twelve months after Jet’s Digital Sojourn …

Pulling the ragged seams of a broken zipper closer together, Jet’s chilled fingers attempted to hold the thin material together against the biting cold. The windcheater wasn’t as effective as its name suggested and every gust bit deeper into his body chilling him to the core.

He pulled the hood tighter around his head and held it shut over his face. It made it more difficult to see but then he didn’t really need to. He had walked through this alley many times, the faded walls alongside stained with a mural he could see even through closed eyes.

Walking out from the alley and across the road, Jet glanced upwards at the large neon letters. Unlit they were still a landmark around here, but his memory took him briefly back to a time when they lit up red, drawing in the kids through the front door and to the machines like moths to the flame. Red neon like that other world he left over a year ago. The memories hurt so he looked up once again to remind himself the sign that said Flynn’s wasn’t on. That he was still trapped in the real world.

Most people took the front door but the man he was looking for would be out back. He didn’t need to work here anymore, his fortune long since made, but there was something about the arcade machines he loved. They defined him in a way that Jet wondered what he had been like when this place was in it’s heyday.

Standing before the back door, Jet let the hood slide down over his shoulders and held his knuckles briefly before the wooden frame. His first job. His first employer liver here. He winced at the irony that his mentor had, for so long, harboured a secret that he himself had only recently been keeping. Would it have made any difference if he had known sooner?

The sound of solid wood came to his ear before he realized his hand had rapped out a call for entry. The quiet sound was lost quickly to the wind.

No answer.

Jet knocked again, this time louder. A fleck of paint fell loose as he did, flickering with dim reflected light as it fell, like the pixels of a derezzing panel. Everything in this world reminded him of the other.

A sharp gust of wind lifted his hair around his face, now black and matted. Nothing in this world seemed to matter anymore. There was only one reason he was here.

But still no answer.

Sizing up the door and remembering where it rattled the most, Jet kicked out solidly with the toe of his worn sneakers, then again. This time the door reverberated in the frame, hammering out his presence to anyone within.

A short pause and the door opened abruptly. Beyond it’s portal, Jet found two long tubes like geometric primitives attached along an axial moving around under his nose. His eyes followed the tubes to the base of the shotgun.

“Jet?” came the surprised voice.

“Hello Flynn,” said Jet. “I need to talk.”

The shotgun wavered and for a brief moment, Jet thought Flynn was going to slam the door, but slowly the barrels dropped to the side and Flynn stood back behind the door. Entry granted. Jet moved inside.

“It’s been a while,” came the voice apologetically from within. “Sorry about the reception. Some bad apples around here lately”

Jet moved past his old mentor and into the gloom, slowing as he realized how dark it was inside. Flynn closed the door behind him, leaving Jet’s eyes struggling to come to terms with the darkness.

“It’s past midnight,” said Flynn, moving between several bulky shadows to a doorframe further inside.  
A sudden flash erupted from the roof and light displaced the shadows. The old kitchen behind the arcade revealed itself in much the same was as it always had been. A messy kitchen littered with the debris of several old video games and even a few cabinets. A soldering iron and oscilloscope that was twenty years out of date sat in the middle of the table. Several small components lay next to a board that looked slightly burned. Repairing old game boards was one of Flynn’s hobbies. Something had happened in his past that made him appreciate every single processor those old circuits had.

Jet blinked several times, his dilated pupils shrinking rapidly in the sudden glare.

“I understand it,” said Jet. “I think I finally understand it” he said, taking a seat ahead of his mentor.

Flynn took a seat in the small kitchen, sitting back and waiting. Jet shifted and ran his fingers through his hair as he leaned back.

“You came here in the middle of the night to tell me you’ve finally realized it was all a dream,” said Flynn, rubbing his eyes. “You could have just emailed me.”

“You know I can’t stand email since it happened,” said Jet, taking a seat adjacent to his old employer.

Flynn nodded. “Something about digitizing really fucks with your head doesn’t it,” he said in sympathy, rubbing his eyes. “I spent years in therapy after my bout.”

Jet shook his head. “It wasn’t a dream,” he said slowly. “It was real and now I know it.”

Flynn fixed him with a direct stare. Now in the light Jet could see he hadn’t shaved for a few days and he looked more tired than this late night visit should have normally left him.

“We never managed to repeat the transfer,” said Flynn. “You’re the only other person who even saw what I thought I did, but none of it’s real Jet. You know that’s true also.”

Jet nodded slowly. He and Flynn had discussed this several times since he came back. His father hadn’t really been in the other world with him, or at least, didn’t remember anything. That in itself was quite confusing for Jet. The Datawraiths in storage were badly damaged and only some returned. Encom was shut down due to the OHS issues of digitizing live people.

The federal agents came in the next day and closed the place down. Sure, the systems kept on running but the place was closed and maintained by federal employees now. The military still had a use for the research, although even they weren’t likely to start digitizing people in the near future.

Even Alan, Jet’s Father, was only permitted to complete enough work to bring back the triumvirate from F-Con after some serious legal intervention from the F-Con board and then Encom was dissolved. The building still stood, but now the company that had occupied it was gone, it’s employees and genius scattered now throughout dozens of companies.

Everyone who had returned from laser suspension during the incident was suffering from some form of memory loss, except for Jet and Flynn. Most retained, at best, dim dreamlike memories.

“Computer programs don’t speak in English,” began Flynn. “And a data bit has just one numerically different outcome. It doesn’ t have a personality. Programs are just lines of code. No more no less. Machines are hardwired memory.”

Flynn pointed across the table at Jet.

“You’re a programmer,” he continued. “You know this. A hard drive doesn’t look like a digital city. It looks like a bunch of ones and zeroes, and even if you render it, it still looks like a bunch of ones and zeroes, or maybe like static on the old analogue TVs. It certainly doesn’t create neon panels of energy.”

Jet nodded once, but his gaze was fixed.

“I remember all of that Flynn, and I remember therapy. I cried for a week when I finally admitted it was a dream. Do you know what it’s like to find the love of your life and lose them? To finally accept that they never existed?”

Flynn nodded, something in his eyes showing sympathy. Had he loved a program like that? If he had then he had never confided it in Jet.

Jet just watched as Flynn got up and pulled a can of coffee from the fridge, poured it into two stained mugs, added some water from a bottle and pushed them into the microwave oven. Papers stacked on top cascaded down to the floor, but he didn’t retrieve them.

Jet flinched as the microwave beeped, each tone causing a flashback. Post traumatic stress disorder they said. Caused by his hallucinations inside the machine.

Flynn’s back was still to Jet as he started speaking, watching the mugs go around inside the oven.

“So what makes you think it was real now?”

Jet looked up at the single incandescent bulb that lit the room, breathing in deeply through his nose, then slowly letting it out.

“Because now I know what happened. I know how to explain it and how to understand it.”

Flynn looked back over his shoulder at Jet then again to the oven as it completed heating the coffee.

“And you want to explain it to me,” said Flynn, returning to the messy and parts-ridden table with the cups, “But in the morning would have been fine.”

“It’s Quantum mechanics Flynn. I understand now how a user can exist in the online world and why it exists the way it does.”

If the words had made a difference to Flynn, he didn’t show it.

“Of course it’s quantum mechanics, Jet, it always was. The correction algorithms were critical to eliminate the uncertainty generated simply by reading the data when we scanned objects. But let’s say you’re right and there really is a world on the other side of the screen. Let’s assume it’s made of bits and bytes like we’re atoms and it’s possible for a user to exist there. Why is this suddenly so important that it had to come here in the middle of the night.”

Flynn’s question was straight to the point. He had been a good CEO at Encom and even an insightful boss when Jet had worked at Flynn’s.

Jet fixed his former mentor now with a direct stare. His gaze locked, he didn’t look away or flinch as Flynn equally returned the intensity.

“I’m going back Flynn - I’m going to find her and I’m going to stay there.”

Maybe something got through that time, because Flynn put the cup down, then returned Jet’s unblinking gaze once again. “You’re serious aren’t you?”

Jet closed his eyes to give the question some thought. On the way here he had played this out in his mind several times. Flynn gets angry, Flynn laughs. Flynn kicks him out. Flynn lets slip with some secret. He hadn’t actually considered Flynn taking him seriously.

Flynn knew about Mercury – about Jet’s search through the data of the crashed hard drive for her code. In retrospect, he should have realized just how serious Jet always was about her. Of his father, the shrinks and his friends, only Flynn seemed to understand how seriously Jet’s heart had been wounded by his ethereal lover’s disappearance.

The silence maintained for a moment longer then the spell was broken by the single silent nod of his head, never once though did Jet look away from Flynn’s eyes as he spoke.

“I love her, Flynn, and I made her a promise. It’s time I kept it.”

The silence returned, and with it a strange stillness. Jet felt calmed by it, like he had been on a long journey and he was only now returning home.

Flynn picked up his coffee, breaking eye contact as he took a slow sip. Flynn was taking him seriously but Jet still needed his help and he had yet to ask for it.

It was going to be a long night.

**Author's Note:**

> Thankyou for reading chapter 1. There are 40 chapters in this fanfic in total.  
> Want to know more? Post some encouragement and I'll speed up the editing timeframe. :)


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